A little bit of navel gazing

10 things you didn’t know about me.

1. I was a chubby kid growing up. Timid and unathletic, I was always picked last in all sports.  I remember how depressed one little league coach would get when he realized he had to play me.  My best baseball move was to bunt.

I had a ‘lazy eye’ as a kid.  Wore an eye-patch for a while.  I had an operation to tighten up the muscle on the left side.  But it was too late, my eyes never learned to work together.

Now I’m monoscopic.  Which essentially means I don’t have stereo vision.  It makes depth perception difficult.  3D movies just look blurry to me.  You know those stereo paintings that were popular for a while?  I couldn’t see anything.

2. When we did the President’s physical fitness challenge in 7^th grade I failed everything except the sit ups. I could do a lot of sit ups.  I remember that day I didn’t wear sneakers and I ended up trying to do all the running and jumping in boots.  It didn’t work out well.
3. Also in 7^th grade I used to race the bus to school by ‘running’ from the bus stop the Mile or so to school.

I grew up on the top of a big hill.  The bus stop was at the bottom.  Everyday we’d have to hike down in the morning and up in the afternoon.

The number of the bus we rode in my first day of first grade was bus #5.  Why wait for the bus when you could beat it on foot?

4. I drove a 1969 Cadillac Eldorado as a teenager. It was a hand-me down from my Dad.  When he was growing up everyone aspired to own Cadillacs.  If you owned a Cadillac you had made it.

He would buy the old Caddies.  I took my driver’s Ed test in a 1976 Eldorado.  That thing was 18.6 feet long and was a bitch to parallel park.

I remember the thing wouldn’t start when the inspector came out to give me the test.  My dad crawled underneath and smacked the starter with a rock.  It started.  I got my license.

5. We got tested for IQ in 3^rd or 4^th grade.  I don’t think we were supposed to know the results, but my Mom told me I had an IQ of 142.  I don’t know if that’s true or she was just messing with me, but I’ve always acted is if it was true.
6. When I got to prep school, I joined the wrestling team, even though I’d been playing ice hockey my whole life. Because they were nice to me.

I was pretty good at it because all it really required was working out all the time.  My parents came to one match when I first started where I got my ass kicked because I didn’t know anything.  They never came back.

In my Junior year we had a great season as a team.  My favorite match was that year.  I dropped a kid from the ready down position with a power half-nelson right onto his back into a pin to win the match at the start of the second round in front of the whole school.

People stopped picking on me after that.  I remember a drunk hockey player trying to fight me when I got to college.  I didn’t know how to fight.  I just grabbed him and put him on his back and held him until he promised to stop.  Hockey players are crazy.

7. I got married when I was 22 to a girl who invited me to her senior prom because she was stuck for a date when we were both 16. That means we’ve been married for 33 years. It also means we’ve been dating for 39 years.  Where does life go?  We’ve had two kids, two dogs and 3 houses.
8. I got a tattoo of a Tasmanian Devil on my hip when I was 18 years’ old. I was a bit rebellious.  But I was smart enough to get it on my hip where no one can see it unless I want them to.  It’s full color with green eyes.  Because I used to joke with my wife when we were dating that she had green eyes.  Her eyes are blue.
9. I’ve only broken one bone in my life. It was playing pick up ice hockey min my 20’s.  I lost the puck in the defensive corner and was so mad at myself I dove face first to block the defenseman’s shot.  I took it in the face and it broke my jaw.  There was a lot of blood.

The thing I don’t tell people is that the defenseman who broke my jaw was a defense-woman.  We had some college women playing with us that day.

I ended up having my jaw wired for a month.  I had to go on a liquid diet.  You have to carry wire cutters with you in case your start to gag or vomit, so you don’t choke to death.  You’d be surprised what you can turn into liquid with a good blender.

I lost a lot of weight!

10. I only started running to get in shape for wrestling season. We used to train on the road during wrestling season in our wrestling shoes which are basically ballet shoes.

I joined the cross-country team because the two captains Tommy Fitz and Timmy Foster were also captains of the wrestling team.

I loved the training.  The racing not so much.  I was the 5^th man on the team.

The way scoring works in cross country is you get points for how many of the other team you beat.  There were scenarios where I counted in the scoring, but not many.

My first cross country race was the Canterbury Invitational in Connecticut.  I injured my Achilles.  Always had trouble with my Achilles tendons.

Which just goes to show you.  Everyone has their Achilles heel!